“But why are we pretending this isn’t an extinction-level event?” she demanded one day. “Why are we so scared?”
The first time she was arrested, she paid her way back onto the streets within three hours, marching before the cameras with the scars of her imprisonment bare across her shoulders, declaring: “This time it’sactuallythe end of the world!”
Her broadcasts evolved. “The Executorium isn’t willing to confront the scale of the danger facing us, because to do so means confronting the weaknesses in our Ventures! Maybe it’s time to admit that the system doesn’t work, and that to face up to what is coming, we need fundamental change!”
This time when the Shine arrested her, there was rioting outside the prison, and she was busted out before security could intervene.
Now she broadcast from underground, and her broadcasts were electric.
“Corruption! Exploitation! Inertia! Stagnation! This is what our Venture has become and they” – everyone loves a polemic “they”; it leaves so much to the imagination – “theydon’t want you to know it!”
It is unclear whether Sarifi actually believed a word she said – perhaps it was just another power play, another bold move to accumulate more Shine by making herself relevant, the kind of firebrand who guaranteed views without ever actually taking anything seriously. Perhaps she understood that it was only her Shine that kept her safe, and her Shine was built on outrage, noise and attention.
It is not especially easy to attach new ideas to something as big as the very literal “end of the world” and its expected arrival in one hundred and seventy-nine years, no matter how charismatically you may express it. But people can channel big fears into more immediate concerns. They were hungry. Saw their debts grow, not diminish. Went sick rather than pay for medicine. Laboured mightily to get more Shine, and yet never seemed to rise. Had been promised hope. Saw only stagnation. Paid their profits in corruption and tasted poison in the water they fed to their children at night. Such a loose conflagration of sparks, each burning by themselves, was not quite enough to start a fire. And yet they simmered.
The last time Sarifi was arrested, there was no public announcement, no legal declaration. She simply vanished without a trace.
Usually that would have been enough, but times had been hard in Heom, and the Executorium clearly misjudged how people would interpret absence.
Petitions became protests, protests became marching through the streets, became unauthorised acts of disobedience, the downing of tools. Became night-time clashes with Venture security, hacks and hijacks of commnet airwaves, mass arrests that onlymade the shouting louder. By the time Special Operations were sent in, the protests were not even about the inevitable destruction of the planet; they were about working conditions and stagnant salaries, about elders left to die because they had not paid enough of their debts to live, about children as young as nine put into the debtor’s collar because they had been judged without potential and sold onto whichever Venture cared to pay a pittance for their labour. Nor were the protests confined to Glastya Row, or even to Heom. The Slow’s message had awoken something across the Shine, a sense of expectations unfulfilled, promises broken. We were supposed to look after ourselves so that no one had to look after each other; yet how did looking out for just ourselves solvethis?
Perhaps this was what the Slow intended all along. After all, qe came with a message, when qe could have said nothing at all.
I did not take part in the riots.
I hid in my room, with the window shuttered and door locked.
Even though there was an airspace suspension, I was meant to go to work, and was fined when I did not. I tried to get a medical certificate to exempt me, but the doctor’s prices were higher than the penalty. Eventually I risked the two-hour walk across the city to the control tower, complete with blanket and pillow so I could sleep on the office floor, but just as I arrived, a strict stay-at-home policy was imposed, fining anyone caught outside their residence, even for medical emergencies. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. That is the Venture way.
So I crawled home in the dark, and to distract myself from the mixture of rage and silence in the streets, I read.
Here: the green-nosed biscuit shark. It is functionally deaf, blind, but its electromagnetic senses are so good it can detect the slightest flutter of a creature up to twenty kils away, and is sent into a frenzy by any boats that come too near, driven mad by the howl of its electrics. It migrates every year from pole to pole in aperfect straight line, following the magnetic currents of the world.
(Gunfire outside; someone calling for help. I put my hands over my ears, keep on reading.)
The aka-aka, many-legged and furry-backed, who build their cities deep in the dust of their home world, and whose spaceships resemble nothing so much as the great organic insect hives from which they came, and who communicate by touch and dance and are known to occasionally eat their dead when times are hard, having digestive systems that are more than capable of breaking down any questionable proteins that might be transmitted by the act, and who have no words for “peace” or “war”, merely “being” and “un-being”, the latter of which is the closest they come to expressing the grotesque violation, the unbearable insult of violence committed against another, which must be punished no matter what by un-being rendered in kind, since consequences, the aka-aka proclaim, are the only way people ever learn.
(The calls for help are silenced. Somewhere, something distant goeswhomp whomp whomp. It sounds like flames. I didn’t know that flames could make that kind of sound, but it seems right, somehow, seems like a kind of burning.)
About the universal vulture, a catch-all term for the tendency of carrion birds to evolve in basically every biome of every world. Most terraforming programmes introduce vultures or creatures like them to help accelerate decomposition within the system. Where they do not, vultures soon emerge anyway, no matter the density of atmosphere through which they float, no matter the meat upon which they feed. Evolution loves a vulture.
(When people do not understand you, and you do not understand people, you must find your beauty and your joy elsewhere.)
I do not know how near the gunfire came.
I did not know if anyone was “winning” or “losing” or what that might entail.
On the second day, the commnet was completely blacked out.I ate dried food from a foil packet and did not answer the door when my neighbour, Elder Zi, started wailing, because it sounded like she needed help. In the Shine, you left the weak behind. That habit had stayed embedded in our society long after we achieved abundance, enriched with words such as “strong”, “independent” and “resilient”. So for a day and a night I listened to an old woman cry, until she cried no more.
On the third day, Special Operations bombed the city.
They gave no warning, sounded no alarms.
I woke to the end of the world, and for a moment I thought it wasn’t the end of the world, but the End of the World, the promised death by binary star, arriving one hundred and seventy-nine years ahead of schedule. My room shook and the windows shattered and the noise… It was not that it was loud, merely relentless, a shock that lingered in the mind long after the ringing outside had ceased. I felt lonely more than I felt afraid. Apart from my parents, who loved me more than they liked me, I could not think of anyone who would especially miss me. My life would come and go, and the only record of its existence would be the debt I had left upon it – 57,423 Glint, a sum that had been swelling and shrinking since the moment of my birth. Covered by the noise of the bombings, I allowed myself to howl, to shake my fists and produce all manner of implausible, strange noises from the back of my throat.
Still here, I screamed. I’m still here! I’m still here!
When the bombing stopped, there were fires.
